Contact Information

Marc Brettler

Marc Brettler

Marc Brettler is the Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies. His research has been centered in several areas: the use of religious metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (God is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor, 1989), the nature of biblical historical texts as "literary" texts (The Creation of History in Ancient Israel,”1995; The Book of Judges, 2002), and in gender and the Bible. He was a co-editor of The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011) and The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001, revised 2010), co-author of The Bible and the Believer (2012), author of Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew(2002) and co-editor of The Jewish Study Bible (2004), which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. His book How to Read the Bible was published by the Jewish Publication Society in fall 2005, and in paperback as How to Read the Jewish Bible” by Oxford University Press in 2007.

He has discussed these books and their implications in a variety of op-eds concerning the public display of the Decalogue, and Creationism and Biblical Studies. He also discussed these issues recently on "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross. He has served on the editorial board of The Journal of Biblical Literature.

Brettler teaches survey courses, such as Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, Women and the Hebrew Bible, as well as Hebrew text courses such as Exodus, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Song of Songs, Biblical Historical Texts, Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Hebrew Composition. His courses and scholarly work highlight the Bible as both an ancient Near Eastern religious text and as the earliest Jewish religious text, to which tradition returns and reinterprets in new ways. He has been awarded the Michael L. Walzer Award for Excellence in Teaching.